Fifteen children and counting...

Family life takes on a whole new meaning for Noel and Sue Radford, who have 15
children. Three are pre-schoolers in nappies, seven are at primary school,
three are at secondary school and two go out to work.. Photographs by

It is 7am on a blustery Saturday morning in Morecambe, Lancashire, and Sue and Noel Radford are pouring the first of their daily 18 pints of full-fat milk over their children's breakfast cereal. Six children are sitting around the family breakfast bar devouring the first box of Asda's Choco Snaps: Milly, 10, Katy, nine, Ellie, seven, Amy, six, Josh, four, and Max, three. Eighteen-month-old Tilly is in her high chair trying to feed herself, and two-month-old Oscar is in Sue's arms as she somehow manages to feed him a bottle while unloading the tumble dryer and piling in the first of the day's five double loads of washing.

Already, the television is on in the sitting-room next door and the noise levels are rising. Eight more Radford children are still asleep: 22-year-old Chris, downstairs in the basement, 18-year-old Sophie, also downstairs with her 19-year-old boyfriend, Joe, who has just moved in. Then there is 16-year-old Chloe, who has a bedroom – a shrine to Justin Bieber – all to herself, and finally Jack, 14, Daniel, 12, Luke, 11, and James, eight, all packed in together in two double beds in their Xbox-heavy den (two vast screens at the end of each bed) creating the air of a youth club rather than a children's bedroom.

Noel, 40 and Sue, 36, have 15 children together, all still living at home in their semi-detached nine- bedroom, four-floored house (a former children's care home, where the family have lived for the past 12 years). On Christmas morning, five of the younger children, plus a friend, will go to the old people's home next door and sing for them: 'The staff like us,' Noel says with a smile, 'and they say, "Don't worry, Mr Radford, the old people can never hear your noise!" '

While they claim around £160 in weekly child benefit (at present this is given to all parents, a small amount per week per child regardless of income), the Radfords support themselves running their home and their 17-seater minibus with the income from their family bakery 15 minutes down the road. Gearing up for Christmas, Noel and Sue plan to spend £2,500 (helped by weekly saving of £30 starting in January), with the older ones receiving gifts with an upper limit of £250 each (the wish list from various children includes several phones, a fake leopardskin coat, a plumbing course at the local college and a chocolate lollipop maker). Fifteen pillowcases will be laid over the sitting-room floor on Christmas Eve, by which time Noel will have already peeled 5kg of potatoes and 3kg of carrots.

Two immediate questions spring to mind. The first, why would anyone have 15 children? And the second: how can anybody cope with that many?

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Sue smiles and ponders as if asked to consider something vaguely surprising. 'We love every new addition,' she says. 'We love the hustle and the bustle. There is always something going on in the house.' The response seems a little unsatisfactory. When I ask her if she is addicted to the process of having a baby, either physically or emotionally, she smiles again and says she just likes having the children around her. 'It's not like we've known anything different,' says Noel, who has completely lost track of the 15 birthdays so that he now keeps a list in his wallet. 'Oh I haven't a clue!' he says. 'We were so young when we had Chris that it's not like we're 25 and looking back to a former life without children. If that had been the case, perhaps it would have been different.'

Sue had Chris when she was 14. The couple, who both lived in Kendal, first met when Sue was eight and Noel, who lived nearby, used to visit to play with her brother. After having the baby, she went back to school, leaving him with her mother, and then left school at 16 to be a full-time teenage mother. By the age of 17, Sue and Noel were married ('Don't try to keep them apart,' the family GP told Sue's parents). By 18 she had Sophie, and then Chloe, 'a very difficult baby', at 21. 'We really thought we'd stop at three,' Noel says. 'And then we thought we might stop at nine with James,' Sue adds.

But they didn't – they just couldn't help themselves. After her seventh, Sue's mother stopped telling her not to have any more. 'She just gave up,' Sue says, 'and now she loves each one as they come.' In fact, Sue's mother is the only help she has – a couple of mornings a week, when she'll take the younger children for a walk and then some weekends when she'll take three children to lighten the load for Sue. In five months' time, Oscar will join Tilly and Max at nursery for the three mornings when Sue's mother doesn't come and Sue will go back to helping Noel in the bakery, working until 1.30pm every day. She had a nanny for a couple of years, working mornings, but didn't really like it. Nor would she like a cleaner. 'I know how I want things done,' Sue says.

Sue and Noel admit that with so much early resistance to their relationship, they were determined to show the world they could make it work, almost as an act of defiance to all the naysayers. Laidback to the point of being horizontal – 'I'm bottom of the pile in this family,' says Noel, who places himself 'between the two dogs and the rabbit' – the couple never argue, they say, apart from the odd bicker about DIY (and I believe them).

Perhaps, too, it is relevant that both of them were adopted. Noel was born on Christmas Eve (hence the name) and given away by his birth mother immediately. Both Sue and Noel have one sibling each, a brother (Sue's brother has only one child). Sue knows little about her birth mother, except that she had had eight children before giving Sue up for adoption as an infant. It is this detail, perhaps, that is both heartbreaking and revealing, although Sue is not one for over-analysing her own motivations. But an outsider is compelled to ask: does Sue want to succeed where her birth mother 'failed'? 'Being adopted is not something I feel consciously,' Sue says, 'but maybe. Who knows.'

'We do want to adopt ourselves,' Noel says, as if a 16th child would be no great strain. 'I just like the fact that we're both adopted and that we could help somebody.' 'And I would like another one of our own,' Sue adds. Are you serious, I ask. When? 'Oh, perhaps in the spring,' she replies. She is going back on the contraceptive pill in the next couple of months, she says, as she always does after delivering her babies, but her GP always says to her, 'Three months' supply, Mrs Radford?' and she nods and they both know she won't be back.

Then, like clockwork, her name will appear on the maternity admissions board at the local hospital and the midwives will fight over who delivers her baby (always induced two weeks early now after she nearly had Katy in the car). She is a familiar face on the labour ward. 'This time, one called another one over and they peered at my stomach. No stretch marks and completely toned,' Sue says proudly. No matter what, Sue always finds time to do her tummy exercises and her pelvic floor exercises, either first thing in the morning or during the babies' nap time. Sue does look amazing. 'It's all the babies!' Katy chips in.

Noel says that having so many children has made their marriage stronger, even though their life is constant hard work (although they certainly don't see it like that). 'Sometimes I say to Noel, "Remind me not to have any more!" but it never lasts for long,' Sue says. The only time they are alone together – when they are not firefighting a problem, be it a play-fight between the boys gone wrong, or a toddler in tears or an exploding nappy – is when they flop into bed at 10pm, exhausted. They never go out for a meal, or to the cinema. There is no leisurely reading the Sunday papers, no books to discuss, and from what I saw over the course of 12 hours, hardly any conversation between them at all outside the business of running the children.

The only thing Sue has for herself is a special display cupboard containing six untouched, brand new Radley handbags, 'too nice to use', each one a different design – a symbol, almost, of an alternative life – her soap operas, which she watches with the girls, and a bit of 'me' time in the evening, when she might concentrate on her appearance (hair, nails, skin etc). Fifteen minutes before the children wake in the morning she straightens her hair and puts on her make-up, then her focus switches. Raising children is a selfless business, but between the hours of 7am and 7pm, often later, much of Noel and Sue's time is devoted to their children. 'We are just very lucky we found each other,' Noel says. 'Sue's a right trouper.' (He goes to the bakery at 4.30am and returns for the 7.30am breakfast routine and school drop-off, goes back to the bakery and then picks the children up at 3pm, then he is straight into the after-school hours.)

He is right. When Sue had Oscar, two days later Noel returned to work. It was the start of half-term and she was alone in the house with 13 children (the two eldest were at work). 'I don't know how I did that,' she reflects, although she says she has a very good 'icy glare' which often is enough to bring the children completely into line. It's worth saying, too, that situations that would bother most parents – siblings niggling one another, or bouncing giant balloons around the kitchen while they are trying to cook supper – leave Sue completely unfazed. Similarly, she battles on through stomach bugs and diarrhoea and patiently combs at least 10 heads of hair each week for nits, assiduously preventing one of her worst 'nightmares'.

Noel runs everybody around in the minibus and cooks dinner every night – spaghetti bolognese, stews or pies from the bakery – and happily admits that nobody listens to him. Chloe is going through teenage hormones – she has just dyed her silky black hair peroxide blond, burning it so badly with the bleach that a lot of it fell out. She blatantly ignored the fact that Noel forbade her from doing it and it's obvious that it pains Noel even to look at it now. Sue is trying to potty-train three-year-old Max, despite having Tilly and Oscar. Amy is going through a whingey stage, and passing it on to Ellie (the pair are like 'best friends').

As Sue and Noel chat away, the younger children, dressed one after the other by their mother in the sitting-room, are running around playing games or watching television. 'They've always got a friend, always got something going on,' Noel says. The boys haven't surfaced yet and won't for hours, Sue says. Nor have Chris and Sophie, the eldest children who are, Sue says, the most loving, helpful and reliable pairs of extra hands.

They are not substitute parents – 'why would people have babies so that their children can bring them up?' she says sternly – but they do fulfil a vital role of backup support, always ready as babysitters if Sue has to nip out and do the food shopping (about £250 a week). The boys all look up to the eldest, Chris, who is a manual worker in a glass factory. He tells me later that he 'can talk to Dad about anything'. When I ask him why he still lives at home amid the chaos, he says, 'I'd be lost if I lived on my own.' He settles on the sofa to watch Dora the Explorer with Tilly tucked in his lap. None of other children thinks it's the least bit strange that they have so many siblings.

Katy, the family's early bird, is already hungry. Sue has now limited the amount of food she has in the house 'because if it's there they eat it, and I found I save quite a bit of money just buying meal-by-meal at Asda round the corner. When you have a family our size, you are always looking to find savings.' Neither Sue nor Noel worries excessively about money, but they are careful.

Outgrown clothes are handed down, for example, and when they go on their annual one-week holiday to Lanzarote the hotel gives them a generous discount. Recently Noel took the low-energy lightbulbs out of the fittings in the children's room to try to teach them the importance of turning off the lights. Although both Sue and Noel are aware of the environmental criticisms often levelled at big families, Noel tells me that he takes great pride in recycling, often fishing out tins and cardboard from the bin.

Josh, who has just started reception, is learning to read. 'We try to do 10 to 15 minutes' reading with the little ones,' Noel says, 'and the older ones do their homework on their own.' Josh fishes out a chocolate bar from the toy box and Sue helps him unwrap it. There are no rules on food as such, apart from James, who is banned from cola because it makes him hyper. Television time and Xbox time is unlimited, and none of the children does any housework, apart from tidy their rooms for the odd £1 here and there.

'I like to do it all myself, really. My mum thinks I'm mad,' says Sue (who also washes and irons for Sophie's boyfriend), as she gets the vacuum and gives the downstairs a quick going over. By my standards at least, Sue is compulsively clean and tidy. She vacuums two floors of the house at least twice a day, cleans the four bathrooms every day ('you need to with so many boys') and changes all the beds once a week. She feels in control, she says, if the house is clean.

It quickly becomes apparent that for a lot of the time the school-age children are left to their own devices. When 18-month-old Tilly staggers into the sitting-room clutching a half-full bottle of white wine, grabbed from the fridge, Sue roars with laughter. It is Tilly, Sue explains, ousted from her position as the youngest, who is really feeling unsettled at the moment. 'She's been a bit clingy since Oscar arrived, but she loves him very much.'

It is a different kind of parenting, less intense and less centred on individual needs, more crowd control and general mayhem and the children happily running in packs of twos and threes and fours: 'I do try to give them one-on-one time, but it is difficult,' she trails off. Sue is not, it is safe to say, a tiger mum nor a helicopter parent. 'I can't talk to Mum,' Milly tells me with no particular sense of injustice. 'She's always doing the washing.' 'Milly!' Chloe says, 'that's not true.' (In fact, Sue does spend an awful lot of time washing and sorting the laundry, which, apart from nit combing, is her least favourite chore.)

Still, Sue says she prides herself on her children being able to talk to her. 'We're an open family,' she says. Sophie, the 18-year-old, who works full-time in the bakery, immediately takes Oscar from her mother for a walk in the pram. She wants children, she tells me, 'but not yet', and nowhere near so many. None of the children wants to follow their mother, all of them putting a limit around the two or three mark, 'because it's a lot of hard work'. 'Sophie was very open with me saying she wanted to have the contraceptive implant,' Sue says. 'I was fine about it. She's going to New York for her birthday with her boyfriend and she said, "Mum, why can't you all come with us? We'll be bored." '

Lunch – a couple of loaves of bread, a dozen eggs and piles of Müller Light yogurts – has been cleared away and all seven primary-school-age children, plus Oscar (in Sue's arms) and Chloe, are climbing into the minibus to go to their school's Christmas fair. Outside the house, Noel shows me the heavy wooden gates he commissioned to stop the younger children running into the road.

Somehow, Sue says, the children have learnt how to travel together as a pack, looking out for one another. Once nestled into the chaos of the Christmas fair, 16-year-old Chloe is assigned Max as her charge and the rest somehow stay with their parents. There is no grabbing at cakes, whining for sweets or any demands for presents. 'People say when we go out that they are a credit to us,' Sue says proudly. 'I love this kind of thing,' she adds, gazing round at the mince pies and the tinsel. 'It's all about the family, it's all about the children.'

This Christmas will be particularly poignant for Sue because it will mark the anniversary of her first and only miscarriage. On December 23 last year she found at her 12-week scan that her foetus was without a heartbeat. She is still deeply upset by the loss, so unexpected for her given the 14 trouble-free pregnancies that preceded it. 'I don't know how I'll be,' she says, 'but obviously having Oscar will help.' (She became pregnant again in February.)

Once back from the fair, fuelled by the chocolate selection boxes that each child was given as a gift from Father Christmas, the play-fighting starts. Katy gets out her cornet and blows no particular tune. Milly is screaming at her brother, 'Luke's a girl!' which provokes headlocks and wrestling. Max pulls the kitchen curtains off their poles ('I've given up wanting nice furniture,' Sue says). A repeat of I'm a Celebrity is playing on the wall-mounted television (James threw a bottle at the old one and smashed the screen) and Oscar is on his umpteenth nappy change.

Supper is homemade pizzas, with each child choosing his or her topping – and then not eating much after all the chocolate. Just when things are beginning to seem manageable, Smokey, the family rabbit, brought in from his hutch by Luke, scampers behind the Christmas tree, followed by three-year-old Max. The tree tips down, falling in the middle of the sitting-room, glass baubles smashing everywhere. 'Don't worry! Don't worry!' shouts Milly as Sue stands propping up the tree, 'I'll go for the Hoover!'

'You see, this is my life,' Sue says. 'Always some disaster.' But I get the impression that's exactly how she likes it.

A three-part series, '15 Kids and Counting', looking at some of Britain's largest families, starts on January 17 on Channel 4